Towards a Pervasive and Predictive Traffic Police Fabio Leuzzi, Emiliano Del Signore, and Rosanna Ferranti Ministry of the Interior – Italian National Police {fabio.leuzzi, emiliano.delsignore}@poliziadistato.it, rosanna.ferranti@interno.it Abstract. The research on traffic flows is historically born to improve road networks, to make trips comfortable and faster. In this research field, as in many others, literary production followed market or business demand. This paper has the objective to clarify police needs, in order to create a research request and to gain attention. It provides an organiza- tional framework concerning needs, goals, fields and some impacts such that different areas of study can concur all together towards a pervasive comprehension of road events, a predictive Traffic Police, so that safety and security can be ensured via a targeted patrolling or intervention. The aim behind the practical level is to pave the way for the interaction between data science from one hand, and law, public administration and justice from the other hand. 1 Introduction Several Police Forces, in Italy, are engaged to improve safety and security. Italian National Police in particular has several sectors in which it is specialist; one of them is the traffic. Among all, it is the only branch of the Police Forces dedicated to the protection of the highways, whereas it is the main reference for the other non-urban motorways, the most important unit in terms of number of men and patrols, and sadly famous for the highest number of losses across all the Police units. In order to characterize the Italian-Traffic-Police activities, we should un- derline that it must ensure, as more as possible, the traffic-laws respect, but it has to deal also with accidents (in particular when anyone dies or is critically injured), crimes and highways protection as critical infrastructure. The spread of electronic technology boosted the production of data in all fields of knowledge without a shared plan or vision. This brought to several sources that made data quickly growing, heterogeneous, time and quality vary- ing, and are so much that cannot be faced with standard techniques of analytics. Clearly, this technological evolution had an impact in vehicles and traffic as well, leading to a tipping point for the Police Forces, that must enhance the competences in order to keep the control of the public safety and security. To introduce a bit deeper the Traffic-Police point of view, let us start to list some needs for each branch of competence.